Category Archives: Doctrine Of God

Balaam’s Ass and Ludwig Feuerbach: Critiquing the Idol-God

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Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher (if his name didn’t give it away), offered a critique of religion, particularly the Christian religion, that ought to have weight as we self-criticize our own understanding of God. Karl Barth took Feuerbach’s critique to heart as he saw in it a critique of natural theology. Here is a key passage from Feuerbach that synopsizes his critique:

Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, or more correctly to his own nature (i.e., his subjective nature); but a relation of it, viewed as a nature apart from his own. The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.[1]

For Feuerbach God is simply a self-projection of the inner-man. Ironically, what people like Feuerbach et al. are doing is simply living out the metanarrative of Genesis 3, and the original serpentine lie. That we can be like, or construct God or gods.

But here’s where this becomes relevant, particularly for Christians in the main. Insofar that Christians attempt to imbibe the culture, even if in the name of Jesus, they end up, like the culture at large, under the influence of someone like Feuerbach; self-projecting a notion of God who confirms them in their inner-desires. In other words, they are living the life of an idolater, even in the name of Jesus Christ (which is the actual way the LORD’s name is taken in vain). Further, when people abandon the Christian faith it is because they recognize or ‘feel’ (subconsciously) that the God they have been worshipping is no longer needed, since He already affirms all of their wants or desires anyway; or, because the God they are presented with comes from the self-projections of the philosophers, and thus cannot actually live up to what the Gospel claims to be as the power of God.

Barth was right to appropriate Feuerbach, since all Feuerbach was doing, from his materialistic vantage point, was confronting the idolatry of the human heart. If God can speak through Balaam’s ass, He can speak through Ludwig Feuerbach.

[1] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 14.

God’s Wrath Towards Sin: In Ontological Perspective

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God is angry about sin, just to be clear. He judged sin, because there was actually a legal penalty associated with sin. But that isn’t the crux of what was judged. The crux was the ground, the source of sin; it has ontological depth. The human heart loves the darkness rather than the Light. It has competing affections that all are premised upon love of self. Unless this was put to death, and unless a new heart was re-created, the problem of sin wouldn’t have ultimately been dealt with. God surely hates sin, but only because He first loved us so much in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. God has wrath towards sin, but only because He loves His very good creation and desires fellowship and intimacy with us through the Son, Jesus Christ. Sin destroys and eats away at the very good creation, and as a result the good (or rest of) creation is corroded and thrown into chaos. The requirement then wasn’t simply a penalty paid—even if that is an outer aspect of the atonement—but a new heart created (cf II Cor 3; Ez 36). It is this inner reality, this depth ontological reality that was required if and fact creation was going to be elevated to its ultimate telos (purpose) in abiding and eternal fellowship within the bosom of the Father in union with Christ by the bond of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Trinity’s Act Becomes the Gospel

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The Gospel is Light in the Light of the Holy Trinity. The Gospel is the center of the way of the Triune insofar that the eternal Logos, the Son of God in coinherence with the Father and the Holy Spirit, freely chose to be human. This choice signals that God has freely chosen to not be God without us, but with us; and this choice was made before the foundations of the world. This ineffable reality, that is the God who has always already been Father, Son, and Holy Spirit funds the very ground of the Gospel. The Gospel is God’s life for us, in action by way of incarnation for the world. The world has materiality and concrete reality only because the Son first chose to become material for the world. In this choice the world came to have a telos, a reason for being. The material world was only created because the Son, in the bosom of the Father, wooed by the Holy Spirit, desired to have flesh and blood, so that we might have glory and co-inheritance with Him. Torrance captures these things well:

While the Lord Jesus Christ constitutes the pivotal centre of our knowledge of God, God’s distinctive self-revelation as Holy Trinity, One Being, Three Persons, creates the overall framework within which all Christian theology is to be formulated. Understandably, therefore, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity has been called the innermost heart of Christian faith and worship, the central dogma of classical theology, the fundamental grammar of our knowledge of God. It belongs to the Gospel of God’s saving and redeeming love in Jesus Christ who died for us and rose again and has given us the Holy Spirit who has shed the love of God abroad in our hearts. The doctrine of the Trinity enshrines the essentially Christian conception of God: it constitutes the ultimate evangelical expression of the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ who though he was rich for our sakes became poor that we through his poverty might become rich, of the Love of God who did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all, for it is in that personal sacrifice of the Father to which everything in the Gospel goes back, and of the Communion of the Holy Spirit through whom and in whom we are made to participate in the eternal Communion of the Father and the Son and are united with one another in the redeemed life of the people of God. Through Christ and in the Spirit God has communicated himself to us in such a wonderful way that we may really know him and have communion with in his inner life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.[1]

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons, 2.

On Being Apocalyptic and Anti-Natural Theology in Theological Orientation

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I wrote the following four years ago. This locus remains my primary point of theological interest. That is, how the Christian claims to know God, under what pressures, has the greatest theological, political, sociological, and ethical implications we could fathom. As you will see, beyond the programmatic entailments engaged with in the following, natural theology, and adherence to it, has clear and present impact on the daily lives of real-life people; whether personally or collectively (as a society). If it is maintained that God and His ways can be known in an abstract ground latent in human reason, consciousness, or brute nature itself, then this will frame the way the Christians under this specter develop their respective ethics and politics; indeed, in light of their ostensible theological soundings. This is why, for Barth, this was all so pressing; particularly as he inhabited the range of two World Wars. In the Reich context it was evident for all to see how a form of natural theology could be deployed for the evilest of ends. In my view, there is no way to massage natural theology into a form that magnifies the name of Jesus Christ. Thus, along with Barth, I believe that the analogia entis (as a subset of natural theology) is Antichrist! We can see how so-called Christian leaders today are equally committed to natural theology, and how that is allowing them to capitulate to the global politics of the day; particularly as that is focused on the politicization of the “health crisis,” so-called “climate change,” and the deployment of critical race theory. All of these things fall under the rubric of natural theology. Confidence in the natural human capacities leads people to the conclusion that we have the powers to manipulate “naked” ideas, or brute natural forces, just the same, to our own beneficial ends. All we end up doing under this sort of posture, though, in my view, is to take by force what alone belongs to God; who alone searches the hearts and minds of all humanity.

With the aforementioned, we now turn to the body of this post.

How do we know God? There are traditions for answering that very question; I follow a particular tradition in contrast to another prominent tradition. This post will explore this question by providing some lengthy description of its unfolding in 20th century modern theology. We will read along with David Congdon, at length, as he describes Karl Barth’s relationship to the analogia entis tradition, and the alternative that is situated in Barth’s dialectical theology. After we have read along with Congdon, we will bring what Congdon has surfaced for us in Barth’s theology into a brief discussion on a doctrine of creation in general. I recognize that I write about this issue frequently and often here at the blog, and this should alert you to the importance I see in it.

In the process of developing Barth’s (and Bultmann’s) style of dialectical theology Congdon breaks off in a section and gets into the issue of knowledge of God vis-à-vis the infamous analogy of being; most commonly associated, in medieval theology, with Thomas Aquinas, and in modern theology with Roman Catholic theologian, Erich Przywara. The version of analogia entis that Barth is most animated by is the version of his German theological counterpart, Przywara. Barth’s reasons for being so animated are indeed contextual to the Third Reich milieu he was situated within, and the way that the Volk (national) church deployed things like the analogy of being, and natural theology in general, towards their evil ends. Some want to relativize or marginalize Barth’s animus towards the analogy of being by arguing that that was only a consequent and development per his idiosyncratic situatedness. Thus, the marginalization goes, Barth’s stance against the analogy of being may have served his purposes towards an attempt at assassinating the Nazi conflation of church and state, but for our current purposes, theologically, such animus would be misdirected. But what this critique fails to appreciate is that the forces Barth was contesting are the dark forces and principalities and powers that have always already been present in this space-time continuum. In other words, there is nothing idiosyncratic about Barth’s stance against the analogy of being or natural theology in general that aren’t just as prescient and present in the 21st century—look around, we are currently in a corporatist oligarchic globalist state wherein the principalities and powers are just as heavy upon us (in their own expressions) as they were in the Deutschland of Barth and the Confessing Church of Bonhoeffer.

In the following David Congdon helps elucidate what in fact this whole debate is about; in particular in Barth’s contest with Przywara (and then by application to the German civilization and Emil Brunner). You will also see the way Condgon, per his thesis, ties this particular debate into a theology of mission (which ties into colonialism and nationalism). We will leave that particular discussion to the side (i.e., mission) to focus on Barth’s problem with the analogia. Congdon writes (in extenso):

The year 1932 marks the climax of the confrontation between Barth and Erich Przywara. Three years earlier, in February 1929, Barth invited Przywara to Münster to participate in his seminar on Thomas Aquinas. In December 1931, Przywara visited Barth again in his seminar on “The Problem of Natural Theology” while at Bonn. These debates, together with Przywara’s request in April 1932 that Barth review his book, Analogia Entis, and the rising political unease in Germany, resulted in Barth’s famous statement in the preface to KD 1.1 that the analogia entis is “the  invention of the anti-Christ.” It was the 1929 meeting that really set the stage for their disagreement, and in particular a comment Przywara made on the morning of February 6. According to the student protocols of the seminary, Przywara began by defending his position regarding the manifestation of God’s revelation in history, including in human consciousness. In his defense he cited the Thomistic axiom “gratia non destruit se supponit et perficit naturam” (grace does not destroy but supports and perfects nature). Przywara understood grace to be both created and uncreated, both native and alien. The justification of the sinner does not annul but rather brings to fulfillment the grace already present in us by virtue of our creaturely participation in the being of God.

Within weeks after this seminar visit Barth delivered his response to Przywara in the form of his lecture in Dortmund, “Schicksal und Idee in der Theologie.” While Przywara is not mentioned, he is the “silent conversation partner throughout.” This is especially clear when he addresses the Thomistic axiom directly:

“Gratia non destruit, sed supponti et perficit naturam.” Analogia entis: thus each existing being as such and also we human beings as existing beings participate in the similitudo Dei. The experience of God is for us an inherent possibility and necessity. . . . The word of God does not mean for human beings a confirmation and reassurance of the naïve confidence that the experience of God is, but rather . . . in contrast to the whole range of possible experience it says something new and not merely more strongly and clearly what people could know anyway and even experience elsewhere. Indeed, this is how things always stand between God’s word and human beings, in that it proclaims something new to them and comes to them like light in the darkness. It always comes to them as to sinners, as forgiving and thus as judging grace. . . . Therefore that ability and necessity, that capacity for experiencing God, cannot be understood at any rate as something “natural”—meaning something given with our existence as such or subsequently associated with our existence as such, nor can it be understood by an appeal to a “gratia inhaerens,” by virtue of which the knower and known would simply and in themselves be in the relation to God of the analogia entis.

Barth explicitly rejects the very axiom to which Przywara appealed to support his position. Grace, Barth says, neither has a basis in nature nor does it become subsequently part of nature. The grace of God is always a judging and forgiving grace, and for this reason it never becomes a “given” (datum) that lies at our disposal. It remains wholly nongiven even in the concrete event of Christ wherein God gives Godself to us. Grace always confronts us as a new event.

Keith Johnson makes this astute observation that much more is at stake here for Barth than simply the old Protestant-Catholic debate over justification, though that is certainly at the heart of the dispute. What concerns Barth is, in fact, the same colonialist logic of the gospel’s cultural captivity that prompted his dialectical revolt against liberal theology fifteen years earlier.

The link between humanity and God [Barth] recognized in 1929 followed the pattern he had seen in 1914 when his former teachers enlisted God in support of their own cause by giving their blessing to the war. Barth’s theology, from that moment on, had been driven by his goal of overcoming this mistake. In Przywara’s analogia entis, he discovered a sophisticated version of the same error, and in the Germany of 1932, the political winds were stirring in much the same way they had in 1914.

Barth’s remark in 1932 about the analogia entis as the “invention of the anti-Christ” is therefore “a direct function of his context. . .. The political turmoil around him had to be on Barth’s mind, and in his view, the church appeared to be complicit in the events that were unfolding.” In other words, the danger in Przywara’s thinking was that he provided a robust theological framework capable of justifying the nationalist propaganda and colonialist endeavors of the German nation. The fact that Przywara’s theology had such a strong internal consistency and grounding in the tradition made if far more dangerous than the liberalism of Barth’s teachers and Protestant contemporaries. It is for this reason that Barth was compelled to sound a clear and unequivocal denunciation of the analogia entis.

To make matters even more interesting, Przywara developed his account of analogy for missionary reasons. He understood the analogia entis as a “missionary principle” whose purpose is to prompt the church to positively engage German culture as the place where God is presently at work. The analogia entis accomplishes this task because “it attempts to meet the world on its own ground rather than insist that the world move to its ground.” We have to recall that, during these years of conversation with Przywara, Barth was simultaneously engaged in a debate with Brunner regarding the “point of connection” between nature and grace. And like Przywara, Brunner also viewed his account of the Anknüpfungspunkt as a missionary concept. A pattern quickly began to emerge. In each of these three situations—the liberal capitulation in 1914, Przywara’s analogia entis in 1929–32, Brunner’s Anknüpfungspunkt in 1929–35—Barth faced a theological position that claimed mission as its ground and aim, and on the basis of this appeal to mission sought to find a point of connection or continuity between God and humanity. The liberal theologians found it in German civilization, Przywara in human consciousness and experience, Brunner in the faculty of reason. In each case the will and work of God became continuous with what is already given and native to human beings in their creaturely existence, and so in each case Barth rendered a decisive verdict in the form of, respectively, the “No-God” in Der Römerbrief (1922), the “invention of the anti-Christ” in KD 1.1 (1932), and the famous Nein (1934).[1]

After this lengthy and enlightening treatment offered by Congdon, I think the primary point of reduction comes to the issue orbiting around a “point of connection” (Anknüpfungspunkt) between God and humanity. As Congdon underscores this has taken various expressions through the centuries, whether that be with Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Przywara, the German nation (of the third reich), or Brunner; it is the issue of ‘the point of contact’ between God and humanity that is significant. It is significant, particularly in Barth’s context, because of the ethical and theopolitical implications this locus entails.

If God can be thought from nature (or natural capacity), if the boundaries between God and humanity, God and the nations can be forcefully brought together by identifying an inherent capacity with nature itself that is gestationally waiting for God to activate and give it birth, then who’s to regulate this sort of grounding between God and humanity; the theologians, the politicians? Barth says Nein. He seeks to take away this seduction for the ‘natural’ human heart, and place the ground for “the point of connection” within the life of Godself in the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ. This is why the type of analogical knowledge of God that Barth supports is grounded in what he calls an analogia fidei/relationis (analogy of faith-relation). Barth recognizes the role that analogy plays in the correspondence of our knowledge of God with God’s knowledge of Godself; but again, even as Barth recognizes the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humanity, and precisely because of that, the shape of analogy he can support is one where it is objectively grounded not in a faceless apophatic God, but only in and from a center in himself that is for us in Jesus Christ. For Barth, within the Calvinian frame, faith is knowledge of God, and faith itself is the bond that God alone in the humanity of Christ has in se but for us as he transcends the ditch between himself and us within a creational nexus wherein all of creation has always already been attenuated and teleologized by Christ who is the Supreme and Firstborn of and for Creation.

I said at the beginning of my post that I was going to also get into a doctrine of creation. At the close of my paragraph above I start to hint at that discussion, but because of the length of this post I am going to close it now. I hope you can at least appreciate what is at issue in this discussion as a result of reading this post. Indeed, Barth had a context, but so has all of theological development; even so called catholic or ecumenical developments. The contextual and conditioned nature of theological development doesn’t negate its global availability or reduce its force to the period or circumstances of its locational unfolding; instead, the merit and weight of various theological developments, such as Barth’s anti-natural theological / anti-analogia entis posture, are weighed strictly by their proximate value in bearing witness to the res (the reality) and power of God’s Gospel who is Jesus Christ. I hope you’ll consider that if you are prone to writing Barth’s position off simply because Barth wrote his theology in the context and shadow of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Just maybe Barth’s theology, even though his heretic was partly German nationalism instead of Arius, has angel’s wings under it; in such a way that it might be a ministering spirit to the thirsty souls adrift in the 21st century evangelical theological wasteland (and I’m referring to the lacuna of Christian Dogmatics for the evangelical world).

 

[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 292-95.

Craig Carter Has Some Work to Do on God: Getting God Right as Threeness and Oneness

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Dr. Craig Carter continues to promote the Christian Aristotelian/Thomist theologies of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the London Baptist Confession of Faith, with particular focus on their respective doctrines of God. He just tweeted the following:

If someone tells you that God has passions, remember that to say that is to go against the teaching of our reformed confessions. Presbyterians & Reformed Baptists cannot go there. “There is but one only living & true God, a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things acc to the counsel of his own immutable & most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful long-suffering, abundant in goodness & truth, forgiving iniquity, transgressions, & sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, & withal, most just, & terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, & who will by no means clear the guilty.” (Westminster Conf. of Faith 1.1) WCF is followed by the London Bap. Conf: “The Lord our God is. . .a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions” The confessions had good theological reasons for denying passions in God. Find out what they were b/c it is crucial to get the doc of God right.[1]

Let me counter: If someone tells you that God has passions, remember that to say that is to be in step with the Holy Spirit of Scripture’s inspiration. Catholic Christians across the ages have worshipped and beheld a God of Constancy; of filial and familial love; of triune relationship and feeling as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As I have written elsewhere in critique of the theology funding the Westminster Confession of Faith (and its structure):

Confessional Shape

Instead of discussing what the distinctions are, in particular, between the so called analogia fidei and analogia entis we shall focus on how these two disparate approaches play out theologically; and for our purposes, confessionally. What happens if a particular theologian, or school of theologians, follows Aquinas’ approach to articulating God, theologically; versus a more Evangelical Calvinist approach?

A brief comparative analysis of three Reformed Confessions—The Westminster Confession of Faith, The Belgic Confession of the Faith, The Scots Confession of Faith—and one Catechism—The Heidelberg Catechism—may be sufficient to illustrate how theological prolegomena can impact the tone and emphases that present themselves in the historic confession and catechism making of the Reformed church. What emerges through this analysis is the reality that while each confession has its own particular style; there can also be a shared dogmatic thread that coordinates common themes of approach per the disparate confessions and catechisms—i.e., like with a doctrine of God.[2]

And:

At first blush there might not be much apparent difference between The Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), The Belgic Confession of the Faith (BC), The Heidelberg Catechism (HC) and The Scott’s Confession 1560 (SC); but this requires further reflection. The “Westminster” tradition starts talking about God by highlighting his “attributes,” these are characteristics that are contrasted with what humans are not (analogia entis). We finally make it to God as “Father, Son, Holy Spirit,” but not before we have qualified him through “our” categories using humanity and nature (analogia entis) as our mode of thinking about “godness.” This is true for both the WCF and the BC. Jan Rohls provides a helpful insight on this when he speaks to the nature of the composition of many of the Reformed Confessions (including both the WCF and the BC):

“It is characteristic of most of the confessional writings that they begin with a general doctrine of God’s essence and properties, and only then proceed to the doctrine of the Trinity. The two pieces “On the One God” (De deo uno) and “On the Triune God” (De deo trino) are thus separated from each other. . ..

Nevertheless, this is not the case for all Reformed confessions and/or catechisms. We should consider the possibility of learning to read some confessions and catechisms together, relative to shared theological emphases.[3]

What Carter is promoting is a certain type of inherited theological methodology and hermeneutic. He, and they (those he communes with in his confessional malaise), have already, a priori decided the shape that the “biblical exegesis” will take as they impose an Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophical apparatus upon the text of Scripture. As such, as I was noting in my passages from above, they end up thinking the oneness of God from a monadic and/or philosophical wellspring that not only doesn’t cohere with the flow of their own confessions, vis-à-vis a doctrine of God, but more significantly, it doesn’t cohere with the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ. They think they are protecting biblical “orthodoxy,” when in fact all they are doing is undoing the impulse of the Protestant Reformation to begin with. They are simply thrusting Protestants back into the Roman Catholic/Tridentine milieu that people like Luther, Calvin et al. were intent on extricating Christians out of.

As far as the methodology that Carter is promoting, and following, and inheriting, as noted, it artificially dissects the oneness from the threeness of God; thus, giving primacy to the oneness, and yet the oneness is distinctively funded not by biblical categories, but instead by classical philosophical categories that weren’t revealed but instead were discovered by profane and pagan minds like Aristotle’s and Plato’s. The point to focus on though is the primacy of place they give these pagans. They allow the god of the philosophers to shape how they understand the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit instead of allowing the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to shape the way they understand both God’s oneness and threeness / threeness and oneness in eternal and koinonial relationship. Carter is surely correct when he asserts: “. . . it is crucial to get the doc [sic.] of God right.” Indeed, Craig, and so you have some work to do . . . get to it!

[1] Craig Carter, Twitter Tweet, accessed 12-12-2022.

[2] Bobby Grow, “Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis?: Either Through Christ or Nature,” eds. Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 105-06; also see Robert Allen Grow, Evangelical Calvinism’s Portrait of a Knowledge of God and a Sure Salvation (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Unpublished PhD dissertation, Concordia Academic Theology Consortium, Intl., 2022), 30-1.

[3] Ibid., 106; 31.

Luther against the god of the Philosophers and Descartes on God Knowledge per Juengel

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Knowledge of God and its bases has never been an uncontested thing in theological development and discourse. The Apostle Paul, of course, famously addresses the issue of knowledge of God in Romans 1 which has become the locus classicus for proponents of an ostensible natural theology:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.

To appropriate this text as if it just does teach a natural theology, or way of thinking God in a form like Thomas Aquinas’ analogia entis entails—which would be a subset of a natural theology simpliciter—isn’t justified. Those who would simply assert such need to present an argument that Paul is intending to teach that who and what God is, is latent within something like the vestiges of creation.

On a different basis, but as corollary with something like Aquinas’ analogia entis, Rene Descartes attempts to present a certain knowledge of God from his methodological skepticism; thus, doubting everything as a basis for knowing until he gets to himself (so his cogito ergo sum). Descartes is offering his own form of an analogia entis, thinking godness from his idea of God that he has more certainly established by conniving God an epistemic ground founded in his own thinking as a prius to God.

Martin Luther yells a resounding Nein (as does Karl Barth in his own way). Eberhard JĂźngel presents an insightful commentary on how Luther differs from Descartes on a theory for a knowledge of God. He writes:

Remaining at the level of rational knowledge of God, for Luther too there is a fundamental cognitive difference between the “that-being” and “what-being” of God, between the ‘existence’ and the ‘essence’ of God: There is “a vast difference between knowing that there is a God and knowing who or what God is.” See Luther, Lectures on the Minor Prophets II: Jonah, Habakkuk (in Luther’s Works, vol. 19), ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1974), p. 55. Whereas Descartes begins with the ‘essence of God’ which is comprehended in the ‘idea of God’ and moves to the ascertainment of the ‘existence of God’ through the ego . . . , Luther takes another route: “Reason . . . knows that there is a God, but it does not know who or which is the true God.. . .” And it is the misfortune of reason overstepping its boundaries that it wants to move from the knowledge that there is a God somehow to the knowledge of who God is, as Luther says: “Thus reason also plays blindman’s buff with God; it consistently gropes in the dark and misses the mark. It calls that God which is not God and fails to call Him God who really is God. Reason would do neither the one nor the other if it were not conscious of the existence of God or if it really knew who and what God is. Therefore it rushes in clumsily an assigns the name God and ascribes the divine honor to its own idea of God. Thus reason never finds the true God, but knows the former [scil. that God exists]—it is inscribed in everybody’s heart; the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit.. . .” This difference does not obtain for faith. For faith knows that God is in that it experiences who or what God is.[1]

Luther concedes that natural humans have an abstract notion of Godness, but this is where such knowledge of God terminates. Ultimately, it could be inferred, that if this was the basis for a knowledge of God in conclusion, what people would end up with, in regard to filling out this abstract knowledge of Godness, would end up being merely a self-projection of the self onto this ‘natural’ schematizing towards a knowledge of God. For Luther, as Juengel helpfully distills, a genuine knowledge of God is only one that is grounded in the eye of faith. Which if this is the case, and I think it is, presupposes that first the hidden God (Deus absconditus) must come down to us and be with as and be the revealed God (Deus revelatus) for us. This is nothing short of what Barth (and TF Torrance) pick up on, and develop into, in Barth’s case, what he identifies as an analogia fidei/relationis (‘analogy of faith/relation’). But sticking with Luther contra Descartes, per Juengel, reason is incapable of knowing who and then what God is. And we could surmise from this if natural reason is incapable in precisely this way, then constructing a theology proper based upon categories provided for by the [classical] philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle represent, ends up being fool’s errand—a fool’s errand because this method can only lead the seeker of God into an abyss of idolatry (as Ludwig Feuerbach understood so presciently in his own modern context).

On a negative note, I present this to you so that you can more critically read what certain evangelical, Reformed and Lutheran theologians are attempting to recover in the name of an orthodox doctrine of God. They are recovering notional categories for thinking God from the direct heirs, in both the “orthodox” realms of Reformed and Lutheran thinkers, to Thomas Aquinas; and we might add, tangled into this, something like Descartes’ thinking in regard to a certainty towards knowing God. I would strongly recommend to avoid this approach in attempting to think rightly, and thus orthodoxly about the living God. As Luther knew, such intellectualist machinations about God, again, can only finally terminate in a conception of godness that is only able to repose in the notion that some ‘unknown god,’ an abstraction of the human-knower, must certainly exist. And if this ‘ratiocination’ about God is followed, what is left, is for said rationales to say both what and who God is; with an emphasis on the former, as we see fruiting in both Descartes and Thomas.

On a positive note, take heart, for those who seek to know God, as Luther so brightly understood, from the faith of Christ, it is here where the seeker stands on solid ground; as the Apostle has written: “For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” When the Christian builds upon this foundation, the one seen with the faith of Christ, it is thence that the knower of God can genuinely be called such. When we aren’t building cathedrals of knowledge of God that wait upon ‘revelation perfecting reason,’ and instead allow God’s Self-revelation to impose Himself upon us, afresh anew by the Holy Spirit in Christ, it is here that the Christian can confidently proclaim that they see the face (prosopon) of God in Jesus Christ. This is the foundation, God’s being-in-becoming for the world in Jesus Christ that God has freely elected as the basis for the would-be knower of God to genuinely know who (and thus what) He is. And this is the all-important conclusion: that God is the one who has laid the foundation for knowing God in and from Himself, for us in Jesus Christ. He hasn’t left the Christian to be an orphan, or archaeologist attempting to discover God under the rubble of the artifacts of paleo pagan thinkers of a purported ultimacy. No, God has deigned that we know God from God alone in Christ alone by grace alone through faith alone; indeed, the faith of Christ.

I won’t directly address the Romans 1 passage, per se. I will leave that to the reader, and see if they can infer how I “exegeted” that pericope throughout the body of this post. (I have also written other posts that deal directly with that passage vis-à-vis a purported natural theology reading)

[1] Eberhard JĂźngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, OR: Wipf&Stock, 1983), 124 n. 53.

God the Father

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God is my Father.[1] Jesus said to Mary post-resurrection, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.” God is our Father. Athanasius writes: “Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.”[2] This is the Christian way for knowing, for thinking God; this is the way those who have the Spirit can call Jesus, Lord; that is, as recognizing their Shepherd, knowing His voice as Son of the Father. As Athanasius rightly noted we don’t think God prior to God thinking us for Himself in Jesus Christ; we don’t attempt to approach God by some sort of two-step into His presence through an abstract creation. As Christians we only know God as Son of the Father by the Spirit; if we don’t, we only know a god of our own imagination and fabrication. Indeed, a notion of godness developed from our fertile imaginations, as if we might see God in the trees, the birds, the fishies, even ourselves. This really is the only alternative to thinking God as our Father. If God is not first the Father, then He is not the Son of the Father, and instead He simply turns out to be a brute creator contingent upon our predication of Him.

Barth writes:

(a) The subject “God” of which it speaks—and in the creed this obviously brackets all three articles—is not synonymous with the concept of a world-cause, rightly or wrongly postulated, disclosed or fulfilled. We may take any view we like of the existence or nature of a world-cause, but it is always posited by man, and therefore even if it is an uncreated, creative and supremely perfect being, it still belongs to the creaturely sphere. It is not God. It is a successful or unsuccessful product of the human mind. It is not identical with the Creator coeli et terrae [Maker of heaven and earth]. Nor can it be subsequently identified with Him and given His titles and predicates. Whenever this happens, belief in the Creator loses its basis and therefore its certainty, its original meaning and therefore its credibility and practical import. The God who created heaven and earth is God “the Father,” i.e., the Father of Jesus Christ, who as such in eternal generation posits Himself in the Son by the Holy Spirit, and is not therefore in any sense posited from without or elsewhere. It is as this Eternal Father, determined in the act of His free expression and therefore not from without but from within, determining Himself in His Son by the Holy Spirit and Himself positing everything else, that He is also the Creator. And it is again as this Eternal Father, and not in any other way, that He reveals Himself as the Creator, i.e., in Jesus Christ His Son by the Holy Ghost, in exact correspondence to the way in which He has inwardly resolved and decided to be the Creator. As He cannot be the Creator except as the Father, He is not known at all unless He is known in this revelation of Himself.[3]

As Barth rightly points out, when we attempt to establish certainty of God on our own, whether that be individually, or collectivistically, we end up circumscribing a notion of God not from God, but from ourselves. When we go this route, abstract from God, and we understand ourselves as the concrete that founds the certainty of God’s existence, He necessarily ceases being our Father, and at best (or worst) becomes a cloned god; a mirrored existence of ourselves who we pump up with superhero powers of the sort that can create worlds populated with the birds and the bees, and thus us. As Barth grasps, and Athanasius prior to him, Jesus’s declaration to Mary wasn’t some type of throwaway statement made in passing. Indeed, what Jesus was once again emphasizing was that in the face of resurrection, indeed the re-creation, the first Word of God is that God is Father. As Father, and Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit, the children of God have an “apocalyptic” basis through which they have gained a capaciousness to think, to know God in real reality. That is to say, to know God not upon a foundation Mary had prefabricated, indeed, her imagination only took her as far as the gardener. But to think and know God the same way that the Son, the One in the bosom of the Father who came to explain Him, knows God, and has known God as His Father, just as sure as He is eternally the Son by the Holy Spirit.

These are deep matters, doxologically sourced by the Father for us in His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Miss ourselves for the “Father,” and we construct a world in our image, and then attempt to bear its burden. This is the fallen world we inhabit, a world populated by a humanity who can only think God as far as the groundskeeper; a world that would rather they be Father and attempt to manage a world of their own making in the face of the living Father. This, of course, only ends in a world of orphans and destitution. When the person comes to finally recognize that the Father has adopted them into His family through and in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, it is at this point that they can cease from bearing the burden of false-fatherhood they have been attempting to live out since their conception.

“Pray, then, in this way:

‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
 ‘Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
 ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
 ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’

 

[1] I have written on this theme previously in my personal chapter for our first volume of Evangelical Calvinism. My chapter is titled, “Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis: Either Through Christ or Through Nature.” This chapter also, more recently, has served as a basis (among others) for my dissertation and PhD by publication currently under examination.

[2] Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.9.34.

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [011] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 10.

Christologicam Determinatam, Christologically Determined Rather than Decretively

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In our Protestant Reformed circles, we often orbit around terms like unconditional election, and its causal theory of determinism, as that is funded more broadly by an Aristotelian theory of causation. For classical Calvinists this total locus can be described as, what Barth identifies in the Latin as, the decretrum absolutum (absolute decree) of double predestination. This is the idea, roughly, that God, based on the gratuitous purposes of His own inner-divine will, chooses some (the narrow few) for election, and others (the broad many) for reprobation, and an eternal conclusion that results in the conscious torment of hell. This, in nuce, is how classical Calvinists (and Arminians, from different emphases) understand a doctrine of election and reprobation; they think it from God’s decree vis-à-vis individual people in abstraction from God’s humanity for them in Jesus Christ.

Alternatively, as an Athanasian Reformed, I would propose an understanding wherein all of humanity is Christologicam determinatam (‘Christologically determined’). This is really nothing new, if you have been reading me (or Barth or Torrance) for any amount of time. But I think this reality needs to be constantly reiterated, insofar that the deus ex machina of classical Calvinist doctrina on theological determinism is simply presumed at every turn in such environs. In an effort to re-alert the reader to what just in fact it means for humanity to be Christologicam determinatam, I thought it would be prudent to hear from Karl Barth, once more, as he cogently distills just what it means for God to choose all of humanity for Himself; that is, to choose all of humanity as first His humanity as primordially pre-destined for Himself the ‘Word to be incarnate’ (Logos incarnandus). He writes:

The true man who lived and lives here as the man of God and therefore in direct unity with God as the God of man, did not and does not live for himself, but as the “first-born of all creation” (Col 1:15), as the last Adam who in order is the first (1 Cor 15:45), he lived and lives for all men in the place of all. All people, therefore, are elected, justified, sanctified and called in Him.[1]

And:

In Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or of God from man. Rather, in Him we encounter the history, the dialogue, in which God and man meet together and are together, the reality of the covenant mutually contracted, preserved and fulfilled by them. Jesus Christ is in His one Person, as true God, man’s loyal partner, and as true man, God’s. He is the Lord humbled for communion with man and likewise the Servant exalted to communion with God. He is the Word spoken from the loftiest, most luminous transcendence and likewise the Word heard in the deepest darkest immanence. He is both, without their being confused but also without their being divided.[2]

This type of determination doesn’t come from an abstract gratuitous decree of God ‘behind the back of Jesus,’ instead this is a trinitarian determination, a pre-destination of God’s life for the world that He freely determined for Himself, and thus His history for the world in the person of Jesus Christ. This determination is personalist and thus dynamic, and not ontologically independent or at competition with who He is in se (‘in Himself’). Christological determinism, if we should call it that, is one that sees the person and work of God in Christ for the world together rather than apart. In contrast to the ‘absolute decree,’ that thinks humanity from some abstract determination of God apart from who He is for the world in Jesus Christ, Christological determinism is rife with the resplendence of God’s one being (ousia) working as One God, in perichoretic and coinherent union, for the one genuine humanity before God, as that has been freely assumed (assumptio carnis) by the eternal Son, Jesus Christ. The Christological determination to be with us, is first funded by His choice to be us, as both the electing God, and elected human as Barth so eloquently articulated this previously.

I set these two courses before you this day. Is it the decretum absolutum or the Christologicam determinatam? The former ends up separating the work of Jesus from the person of Jesus, thus reducing Jesus to an organan, a mere instrument of salvation. In this schemata Jesus becomes the ‘means’ by which God (the Father) purchases the elect for eternal justification. As such, Jesus might as well be a demi-urge of Gnostic flora and imagination in the absolute decree environ. While latterly, to be Christologically determined entails the notion that Godself, in all of his ineffable resplendence has stooped down in His person and done the work of salvation that we could not do ourselves. He came and personally personalized us in His person for us in Jesus Christ (an/ -enhypostasis). Christological determination thinks God, and His acts, from God rather than from an absolute decree as that is understood through the vestiges of God ostensibly littered about throughout the created order (can-o-worms).

Choose wisely.

 

[1] Karl Barth, The Christian Life, 125 cited by Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification: Barth’s Hidden Vision for Human Transformation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018), 57.

[2] Karl Barth, Humanity of God, 46-7 cited by Jeff McSwain, Simul Sanctification, 58-9.

Luther’s Kerygmatic God Versus the Speculative god of the Thomists

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The Christian world needs a revival! It needs to come to a genuine knowledge of God. Not a speculative knowledge, as those retrievers of Aquinas would have it; but a concrete known knowledge of God gifted to us in God’s Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ. When God becomes a predicate of a notional ‘godness’ that ‘we’ (think the philosophers) connive, God simply becomes a projection of our own faces (Ludwig Feuerbach knew this well). But this is the God that the evangelical Reformed types these days are introducing people to. Not the God of the Bible revealed in Jesus Christ, but the god of the philosophers, whether that be of Aristotle, Plotinus, or Descartes. The reformational types, if they are going to retrieve anyone, it ought to be a Protestant par excellence, like Luther, rather than the Catholic par excellence, Thomas Aquinas (and the whole mode of philosophical speculation about God that followed).

In the following Eberhard JĂźngel offers an insightful comparison between the speculated god of Rene Descartes versus the biblical and concrete God of Martin Luther. As the reader will see, the God of Luther is the kerygmatic God in Jesus Christ.

Remaining at the level of rational knowledge of God, for Luther too there is a fundamental cognitive difference between the “that-being” and “what-being” of God, between the ‘existence’ and the ‘essence’ of God: There is “a vast difference between knowing that there is a God and knowing who or what God is. . . .” Whereas Descartes begins with the ‘essence of God’ which is comprehended in the ‘idea of God’ and moves to the ascertainment of the ‘existence of God’ through the ego . . . , Luther takes another route: “Reason . . . knows that there is a God, but it does not know who or which is the true God. . . .” And it is the misfortune of reason overstepping its boundaries that it wants to move from the knowledge that there is a God somehow to the knowledge of who God is, as Luther says: “Thus reason also plays blindman’s buff with God; it consistently gropes in the dark and misses the mark. It calls that God which is not God and fails to call Him God who really is God. Reason would do neither the one nor the other if it were not conscious of the existence of God or if it really knew who and what God is. Therefore it rushes in clumsily and assigns the name God and ascribes divine honor to its own idea of God. Thus reason never finds the true God, but it finds the devil or its own concept of God ruled by the devil. . . .” For “Nature knows the former [scil. that God exists]—it is inscribed in everybody’s heart; the latter is taught only by the Holy Spirit. . . .” This difference does not obtain for faith. For faith knows that God is in that it experiences who or what God is.[1]

Knowledge of God is, of course!, key to all Christian existence and its theology. Get knowledge of God wrong, and everything subsequent is askew. If knowledge of God isn’t grounded in God’s Self-knowledge given for the world in Jesus Christ, then all that we are left with is a knowledge of God based upon our own whimsical machinations about what godness must be like. If we are left to this mode, the latter iteration, then, in the end, we haven’t been thinking about and talking to the genuine and living God whatsoever; indeed, all that we would have been doing is speaking to ourselves in self-assigned sacrosanct ways. This, I contend, is precisely what the god of Thomism presents the Church with. While this matter is a complex, given intentions and periodization, nonetheless, at an ultimate end what matters is that the Christian gets God right. And the only way to do that is to rely on the God who breaks the philosopher’s god’s back with the weight of His glory as revealed at the cross. Jüngel writes further: “The Cartesian God on the cross—and the cross would collapse! The ‘infinite substance, independent, omniscient, and omnipotent’ is too heavy. And that is its weakness.”[2] Jüngel’s, clearly, is a critique of a Cartesian notional God; I am applying his critique, clearly, to the contemporary Thomists, more broadly. The point of the matter holds true across all philosophers, and their respective notions of godness: they all start with an abstract human reflection about what godness must entail, and then attempt to synthesize the God of the Bible, the God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ, with that. But as Jüngel (and Luther et al.) rightly underscores, this presents us with an irradicable contradiction. The God Self-revealed in Jesus Christ breaks the philosopher’s genius by presenting it with an otherworldly sui generis reality that can only be accounted for by the categories of faith as presented in a logic of Grace.

I hope others will come to grasp the gravitas of these things, and stand against the tide of Thomist and other philosophical retrieval being done in the name of Christ and orthodoxy. There is no orthodoxy ‘but Christ and Him crucified,’ and the logic that the ‘wisdom of the Cross’ is suffused with as if from a new logic that contradicts the old. There is a better constructive way to be an ‘orthodox’ Christian while not selling out to the mainstream of revisionist retrieval being done by most evangelical theologians today; and this, on one hand or the other. Show me someone’s prolegomena, and “what” or “who” their God is will become immediately clear. Let’s be good Protestants, anyway.

[1] Eberhard JĂźngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism, trans. by Darrell L. Guder (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock [Reprint], 2009), 124 n. 53.

[2] Ibid., 123.

Against Winsomeness Because of God’s Holiness

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Someone I know from online recently wrote a viral article for First Things where he gently critiques the approach of Tim Keller. His primary critique was of the ‘winsome’ and purported ‘third wayism’ that Keller has operated with for the last couple of decades, and even further back. My friend, James Wood, made some appeal to sociological analysis as a way into making his critique of Keller. In nuce, the argument was that Keller’s winsome approach may have had some resonance in the last decade or so, but that we have moved into times that aren’t as receptive to Christian “niceness.” Indeed, Wood has critiqued further that the Keller approach may have never been an effective strategy of outreach to begin with (or maybe that’s just me reading my own hagiography into these things).

I’m going to be blunter (what’s new). Things seem less nuanced than this to me, even though I understand that people convinced of being “faithfully present” and winsome won’t have ears to hear this (at least until the Eschaton). As I read the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, what I find is a God who, while Fatherly and Lovely, doesn’t shrink back, who doesn’t “contextualize” in such a way that He comes off as “winsome” when confronting the sins of His people; not to mention the sins of the world in general. Indeed, when God confronts sin, whether that be in the OT or NT, it always involves blood and judgment. Some might push back and say: “well, that’s because God accommodated Himself to the Ancient Near Eastern culture His covenant people inhabited, and mediated judgment, under His theocracy, under the strictures dictated by said conventions and customs of the time.” Indeed, but He established the New Covenant in the blood of Christ, and that remains the reality, with the scars in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side in tow for all eternity. In other words, even though the once and for all bloody sacrifice has been made for all of humanity, it is this sacredly shed blood that stills cries out as the blood of the Sacrifice, the blood of the Passover that always already confronts and contradicts us sinners with the very life and power of God as witness both against us even as He is for us. In other words, He is indeed, as Barth underscores, the ‘Judge judged,’ but since we remain ‘simultaneously justified and sinner’ until we are finally rescued from these ‘bodies of death,’ since we continue to inhabit a battled-body that is fighting between the things of the Spirit and the things of the flesh, God in Christ by the Holy Spirit confronts us, He persuades and convinces us, He convicts us of our sin, constantly, calling us to the repentance that Christ first won for us in His vicarious humanity. So, because God loves us, because He is merciful and gracious, He doesn’t leave us in the squirminess of our sins; note:

Again the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations, and say, ‘Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: “Your birth and your nativity are from the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. As for your nativity, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed in water to cleanse you; you were not rubbed with salt nor wrapped in swaddling cloths.  No eye pitied you, to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you; but you were thrown out into the open field, when you yourself were loathed on the day you were born. “And when I passed by you and saw you struggling in your own blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ Yes, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I made you thrive like a plant in the field; and you grew, matured, and became very beautiful. Your breasts were formed, your hair grew, but you were naked and bare. “When I passed by you again and looked upon you, indeed your time was the time of love; so I spread My wing over you and covered your nakedness. Yes, I swore an oath to you and entered into a covenant with you, and you became Mine,” says the Lord God. “Then I washed you in water; yes, I thoroughly washed off your blood, and I anointed you with oil. I clothed you in embroidered cloth and gave you sandals of badger skin; I clothed you with fine linen and covered you with silk. I adorned you with ornaments, put bracelets on your wrists, and a chain on your neck. And I put a jewel in your nose, earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen, silk, and embroidered cloth. You ate pastry of fine flour, honey, and oil. You were exceedingly beautiful, and succeeded to royalty. Your fame went out among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through My splendor which I had bestowed on you,” says the Lord God.

God is God. God is Holy, and commands us to be ‘holy as He is Holy.’ In Christ His ‘conversation is with grace seasoned with salt,’ but it is blunt and-in-your-face nonetheless. We might be prompted to think of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well; or maybe Jesus and the moneychangers; or perhaps his tirade against the Pharisees and their “dead man’s bones”; or maybe we might think of the Apostle Paul calling out the guy having potentially incestuous relations with his mom, and handing him “over to satan”; or maybe the way Paul confronted Peter for his hypocrisy in Galatia. Not to mention the brutal reality of the cross of Christ, and the holiness demanded there; or the book of Revelation, with particular reference to chapter 19. Or what about the author to the Hebrews chiding the Hebrew Christians for ‘trampling the blood of Christ under foot and counting it a vain thing?’

The point is that there is an urgency to God’s holiness such that the Christian must bear witness to it in all con-versations of life. We aren’t worried about being winsome, but that doesn’t mean we have to be mean or nasty either. It does mean that we are not of those who shrink back and fail to testify, speaking the truth in love, that God is God, that God is Holy, and demands holiness of all people; that is if people are going to ‘see Him.’ God is gracious and patient with us ‘desiring that none of us perish,’ and it is precisely because of this that the Christian doesn’t waste time thinking of “strategies” in regard to how to relate to the world in non-offensive ways. Indeed, if the Christian is genuinely bearing witness to Christ in the world, they will be considered foolish and weak precisely because the Christian is bearing witness to the scandalous reality of the cross of Christ. At the very crux of the cross God’s holiness is on display, and this is exactly what the world, and cultures writ large find so offensive.

At the end of the day, we all stand before the Lord, even as Christians. There is a Bema judgment seat for Christians, and we will be held to account for what we did with what God has given us in Himself in Jesus Christ. I am uninterested in wasting time, I’m here to redeem the time, and then beatific vision.